For years, the United States’ political dysfunction has been attributed to large-scale social and economic changes. Experts point to the failures of globalization, rising inequality, reduced social mobility, or the long aftermath of the “China shock” more than two decades ago to explain today’s extreme polarization, collapsing trust in institutions, democratic erosion, immigration backlash, and struggling middle class. Yet there is another widely overlooked factor that is equally central to understanding the United States’ current predicament: the war on terror.
Typically, when policymakers and analysts speak of the global war on terror—the defining fact of international affairs for two decades—they discuss the damage done to terrorist groups, the plots that have been thwarted, the rise and fall of jihadi ideology, the many intelligence failures, and, perhaps above all, the two forever wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. These are the scorecards of contemporary counterterrorism. But left out of this framing are the profound effects of this vast war on terror on domestic politics and society.
The human statistics alone tell an appalling story: more than 7,000 U.S. troops were killed in action, 53,000 were wounded, and well over 30,000 took their own lives—a staggering number. According to Brown University’s Costs of War Project, these conflicts added $8 trillion to the U.S. national debt, with trillions more projected in the future for veterans’ health care, including for the half million GIs with traumatic brain injuries and posttraumatic stress disorder.
Yet even these numbers fail to show the myriad ways in which two decades of war transformed the United States. For years, the fixation on Islamist terror shaped a culture drenched in fear, as voices from politics, the media, civil society, and a swelling counterterrorism-industrial complex insisted that the country faced an existential threat. Amid this climate, the government was given broad new powers to root out and prosecute potential jihadi activity wherever it might be, and the widespread assumption that there might be another terrorist attack began to reshape American society itself. Rather than bringing the country together behind a shared—and narrowly defined—enemy, however, the result has been a dramatic decline in social cohesion. It has contributed to the demise of political bipartisanship, already weakened in previous decades. At the same time, the war on terror fueled an alarming rise in xenophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment and discredited the country’s political and foreign policy elites.
Above all has been the uncontrolled expansion of executive power. This impetus did not begin with the war on terror; generations of American leaders and scholars have sought to increase presidential power, drawing up mechanisms that could sideline civil liberties and intertwine military and police activities. But after 9/11, these contingencies were used to give the executive branch sweeping new authority in the name of domestic security. And today, an authoritarian president is using these powers to target his political enemies. The United States, then, is overdue for a reckoning with the political legacy of the war on terror.
THE POWER OF NIGHTMARES
Anxiety about extended war has preoccupied American officials throughout U.S. history. In the first years after the country’s independence, James Madison, who would become the country’s fourth president, observed that “no nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of continual war.” More than a century and a half later, U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower sounded the alarm about “the acquisition of unwarranted influence” by what he famously called “the military-industrial complex.” As Eisenhower forewarned, “The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” For many of the decades since, much of that apprehension has been focused on the concentration of power in government and in the broader machinery of war. Yet during the war on terror, parts of society mobilized in parallel with the state and sought to cast a much wider net against a class of perceived enemies.
Terrorist acts are typically carried out by secret actors operating within a country’s borders, and 9/11 was the ultimate case in point. The attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon—the first on U.S. soil since World War II—were carried out by foreign nationals inside the country. They were motivated by the al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden’s particular brand of jihadi ideology, which held that major attacks on the U.S. homeland would lead Washington to withdraw support for the apostate rulers of the Muslim world. These themes—which also carried notions of proportional revenge for the number of Muslims previously killed by the United States—and the attacks themselves gave license to Islamophobes throughout American society, including in the political world and policy establishment. The most influential came from the evangelical churches: to their huge audiences, leading televangelists such as Franklin Graham, John Hagee, and Robert Jeffress described Islam as “satanic” and a “heresy from the pit of hell” and its followers as a cult of pedophiles.
President George W. Bush sought to tamp down the hatred by insisting that the war on terror was not a war against Islam. But for all his protestations, many saw the war on terror as a crusade—a word that Bush himself used early on until he was told how poorly that played in the Islamic world. His message was further belied by such government actions as the detention of at least 1,200 Muslim men—many of whom were held on immigration charges but treated as high-security risks—and the severe curtailment of Muslim civil liberties by the FBI and other law enforcement in the name of addressing the terrorist threat. The fact that the 9/11 hijackers had been sustained by an efficient Muslim support network within the United States no doubt contributed to these measures, as did reasonable concerns about the potential for online radicalization.
Trump blurs the lines between Islamophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment.
In the decades since, the persistence of fear-mongering and the growth of anti-Muslim sentiment and hate crimes has been hard to miss. When the Obama administration sought to transfer foreign detainees captured in the war on terror from Guantánamo to facilities in the United States, Republicans depicted them as superhuman terrorists that no U.S. prison could safely secure. The plan was nixed. In 2014, when it was revealed that a jihadi’s laptop found in an Islamic State (ISIS) hideout in Idlib, Syria, contained some basic information on bioweapons, members of the flourishing counterterrorism commentariat claimed that terrorists planned to cull the African Ebola virus from victims’ corpses and spray it widely in American urban centers. Candidates for high office found the terrorist threat to be the gift that never ceased giving. Political scientists at Dartmouth, where both of us have taught, recall hearing former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, tell elderly women in a remote New Hampshire village that jihadis might take them hostage in their homes if they didn’t vote for the tough-on-terror candidate.
Claims such as these were contradicted by the actual state of the threat. By 2016, it had been several years since U.S. Navy SEALS had killed bin Laden, and al-Qaeda had not managed a second attack against the United States in 15 years. The few, ostensibly Islamist-related attacks that had happened on U.S. soil were mostly lone-wolf actions, in the sense that they were not deployed and directed by al-Qaeda operatives based outside the United States. Instead, they were radicalized in place through exposure to news reporting, online propaganda, preaching, and the fellowship of like-minded individuals. (A partial exception was the 2009 Fort Hood massacre, carried out by a U.S. army major, who had corresponded with Anwar al-Awlaki, the American cleric with links to al-Qaeda who was later killed by the United States in Yemen.) In 2014, ISIS captured global attention with its claim to a caliphate and insurgency in Iraq and Syria, and it was better than al-Qaeda at recruiting followers in Europe and North America. This group carried out or claimed responsibility for bloody attacks in Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, and Spain. Several of these were devastating mass casualty attacks, but none were in the league of 9/11. Notably, ISIS’s rise in the vacuum created by the U.S. toppling of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was a result, not a cause, of the war on terror.
The lack of attacks was not simply luck. Throughout these decades, U.S. intelligence and law enforcement professionals—operating far from the overheated rhetoric of the era—dealt methodically and capably with the terrorist threat. During this period, government agencies achieved a level of integration that had improved dramatically since pre-9/11 days. Foreign intelligence services and civil authorities were tightly coordinated in the effort, making it possible to know who was attempting to cross the United States’ borders. Indeed, by the time al-Qaeda struck the United States again—a 2019 shooting at a Florida naval base that killed three and injured eight—the group was a shadow of its former self. As ISIS made clear, the fading of al-Qaeda did not usher in an age of Aquarius. Yet according to solid longitudinal polling, the degree to which Americans prioritized terrorism no longer reflected quotidian reality.
The unanswered and perhaps unanswerable question emerging from this period is whether the relative security Americans enjoyed in the decades after 9/11 owed more to intelligence and law enforcement and domestic security measures than to the progress of the expeditionary wars and targeted killings that were meant to root out the problem at its presumed source. Nonetheless, the question remains a vital one for those who are responsible for anticipating terrorism threats and constructing both defensive and offensive approaches to them.
FOREVER WAR TO CIVIL WAR
In hindsight, 2016 marked a decisive hinge point in the war on terror, when the primary question shifted from faraway military conflicts to allegedly dangerous new threats at home—and not only those from Islamists. The United States had plenty of experience with nativism before 9/11. But a decade and a half of fear-mongering produced something entirely new. Perhaps nowhere was the legacy more pernicious than in the fusing of terrorist fears with broader anti-immigration sentiment. As numerous postmortems for the 2016 presidential election made clear, stoking anti-Muslim sentiment helped mobilize the Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s base, even though economic concerns won him that close election. On the campaign trail and then in office, Trump continually blurred the lines between Islamophobia and broader anti-immigrant sentiment. One day he decried murderers, criminals, and rapists coming across the southern border; the next, he asserted that the migrant flows were cover for jihadis.
Perhaps the perfect symbol of Trump’s fusion of the threat of terrorism with the challenge of illegal immigration was his repeated warnings in 2018 about a migrant caravan making its way from Central America to the U.S.-Mexican border—a caravan he claimed had “unknown Middle Easterners in it.” To be fair, the U.S. intelligence community was concerned that jihadis were exploiting chaotic conditions at the border to infiltrate the United States, but the fractured nature of interagency databases made this hard to know. In his effort to appear tougher than any competitor, Trump called for bringing back waterboarding and some unspecified technique that was “a helluva lot worse than waterboarding.” Speaking of ISIS operatives, he also said he would “take out their families.”
Still more striking, candidate Trump managed to radiate Islamophobia even as he decried the post-9/11 forever wars, stymieing his Republican rivals and his eventual Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. In a way, this marked a decisive shift in the war on terror toward the American homeland. One of the two candidates for president, one of the country’s foremost politicians, was expressly lumping together a sizable American ethnic minority with external enemies. Even when the subtext of previous policy suggested suspicion of American Muslims, federal leaders never expressed explicit hostility. Trump did. Once elected, he implemented a Muslim travel ban, which he introduced just a week into his term and reformulated repeatedly until the Supreme Court finally approved it 18 months later. He also created a permissive structure for xenophobes and racists, spurring a dramatic increase in hate crimes with victims from minority groups of all kinds and accelerating the disuniting of the United States.
In his second term, Trump has gone much further. In 2025, the administration invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 against alleged members of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang, described them as an invading force, and sent detainees to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center. The Supreme Court required adequate notice to permit habeas challenges, but removals had already begun. In Florida, the government opened a remote Everglades detention compound called “Alligator Alcatraz” that might usefully be thought of as Guantánamo transplanted to U.S. soil, with its geographic isolation and removal from the domain of law. The facility shuttered after a year, but only for reasons of expense; it cost over a billion dollars per year to run. And by then, the administration was making an even more direct connection with the war on terror, as some immigrant detainees were now sent to Guantánamo itself. The Pentagon also became involved, with active-duty personnel providing logistical and operational support for a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) detention mission. In other words, institutions created for external war, border enforcement, and domestic policing have now become components of a punitive system against immigrants who may not even have a criminal record. As a practical matter, it became a test bed for the detention of political prisoners, or, as Trump described them, “enemies of the people.”
The Trump administration is not alone in using Islamophobia to drive an anti-immigrant agenda. Texas Governor Greg Abbott, for instance, has long been famous for railing against illegal immigration. But as The New York Times put it in August, citing Republican consultants, “Islam has replaced the border as a major concern” for voters. To date, Texas officials have blocked a real estate development that includes a mosque and threatened to withhold state funding from airports that provide washing stations for Muslim prayer, among other steps. Meanwhile, Republican politicians across the country have denounced the electoral successes of Muslim politicians, including Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed. Some have even suggested that these officials either are not American citizens or should lose their citizenship. Trump has remarked that “jihadists are being elected all over the place.”
COUNTERTERRORISM-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX
The sociologist Charles Tilly’s maxim that “war makes the state; the state makes war” applies not just to early modern state formation but also to how the United States’ counterterrorism efforts led to a dramatic augmentation of state powers. The war on terror propelled the United States to collect and combine information, including on its own citizens; classify individuals it considered dangerous; combine both active and reserve component military units for the purposes of population control and law enforcement; and use coercive power under a variety of emergency authorities. It also reinforced an “us against them” conception of public life in which political disagreement could be recast as disloyalty and whole minority groups treated as presumptively suspect. The perception of an enduring terrorist threat increased support for coercive policies, even among Americans otherwise resistant to authoritarian appeals.
Of course, the United States faced security threats before 9/11. Yet whereas the Cold War security state depended on accurate intelligence on adversaries’ military forces and key assets, counterterrorism is focused not on large formations or fixed installations but on locating individuals hidden within large populations, both at home and in foreign societies. Defending against al-Qaeda required officials to identify suspicious people, trace money and travel, map personal networks, and act before an attack occurred. After the shock of the 9/11 attacks, Washington developed an information-sharing network that crossed the foreign and domestic divide and could search customs, immigration, intelligence, and regular law enforcement records. Joint Terrorism Task Forces set up by the FBI and state and city fusion centers created by DHS implemented this model in parallel at the local level. Their missions soon exceeded terrorism to encompass other facets of public safety. In time, national security institutions were routinely vacuuming up ordinary police information, and local law enforcement officers were combing through federal intelligence. The structure was built for finding needles in haystacks. Once built, it could search for needles of all sorts.
Such capabilities made it easy to expand political control and executive power, should an elected leader choose to use them for these purposes. Top government officials could identify not only suspects but also their associations, movements, communications, and supporters, making these tools convenient for targeting individuals and groups, both real and invented, and stigmatized communities. Commercial platforms increased their reach. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—which was founded in response to September 11—has contracted with the American software company Palantir for ImmigrationOS, a system intended to assist in the selection and apprehension of deportation targets. Artificial intelligence, and its inherent scalability, has accelerated the process by eliminating the main bottleneck to comprehensive surveillance: scarce manpower. The logic was visible during the 2020 protests in Portland, Oregon, when DHS officers monitored social media, accessed travel and immigration records, and assembled dossiers on protesters and journalists. Unidentified armed federal officers used unmarked rental vehicles to detain people and took some to holding cells in the federal courthouse without explaining what agency held them or why.
The federal government’s evolution since 9/11 is reflected not just in its activities and capabilities. Its sheer mass has grown, as well. Since ICE was created in 2003, its annual budget has risen from $3.3 billion to almost $29 billion; in the same period, its corps of armed officers has grown from 3,000 to 22,000. Meanwhile, police forces across the country have transformed from lightly armed constabularies to small-scale armies. Before 9/11, the Defense Department had transferred only $27 million in hardware to local police forces. Since the attacks, the number has climbed to more than $1.6 billion. In numerous jurisdictions, police can now respond to demonstrations with mine-proof armored vehicles, camouflage, body armor, and large-caliber weaponry.
The government’s target set has also expanded. In 2025, the White House issued National Security Memorandum 7, which, among other things, designated antifa—a mostly made up, decentralized, left-wing political movement opposed to white supremacy and (per its name) fascism—as a domestic terrorist organization, a status not formally recognized in the law. The memorandum directed Joint Terrorism Task Forces to investigate organized political violence carried out by those who belong to this supposed network. The offenses were “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity . . . extremism on migration, race, and gender . . . hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.” The crimes to be investigated by the task forces largely related to protected speech. A subsequent counterterrorism strategy document in May 2026 referred specifically to the “politically motivated killings of Christians and conservatives.” The document treats hostility to Christianity as one of the diagnostic markers for identifying organized political violence, alongside anticapitalism and anti-Americanism.
The Trump administration has also used counterterrorism precedents to justify the widespread use of lethal force. Beginning in 2025, the administration labeled suspected drug traffickers as narcoterrorists, giving it legal cover to use military strikes against boats and land sites in Latin America. By August 2026, its operations had killed hundreds of people, often without public evidence to establish a crime or even the basic identities of those targeted. Attacks against Iran in May 2026, meanwhile, killed much of the upper echelon of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Different legal authorities were invoked, but as with the purported drug dealers, the White House used classifications and military practices from the war-on-terror era to justify and conduct its operations. Although Israel’s preemptive and retaliatory reliance on targeted killings has drawn much attention, this mode of warfare characterized the American war on terror very nearly from its outset, including the arming of drones for this purpose; the first armed Predator flew in October 2001. During the Trump administration’s anti-immigration campaign within the United States, four Americans were killed and three wounded with the same impunity as the 526 targeted attacks conducted outside war zones from 2009 to 2016 during the latter phase of the war on terror. The war on terror’s focus on dangerous individuals, in other words, supplied a template that is now being applied to suspected criminals, foreign officials, heads of government, migrants, and protesters.
Domestic military deployment has followed a parallel track. In 2002, Washington established U.S. Northern Command to direct homeland defense and support civil authorities. In 2025, the army created Western Hemisphere Command by combining Forces Command, Army North, and Army South under one four-star headquarters responsible for readiness, homeland defense, and operations across the Americas. Neither change erased statutory barriers to domestic military law enforcement. But both reduced the organizational distance between military forces prepared for overseas combat and missions close to home. Since June 2025, the administration has deployed National Guard personnel or active-duty Marines to six American cities. It has also assigned active-duty personnel to support ICE processing and detention facilities. These steps did not formally merge the military and DHS, but they created recurring joint operations through which domestic coercive missions could expand.
Meanwhile, Trump is politicizing the armed forces, basing appointments and promotions on partisan loyalty and degrading or simply ignoring long-standing professional norms. These changes will presumably weaken the institutional barriers to the military’s political use, which concerns the missions the president assigned to military personnel, as in Los Angeles, where National Guard troops and Marines accompanied federal immigration operations. A federal district court found that troops had been systematically directed to perform law enforcement functions, including patrols and traffic control, in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, and the administration ultimately halted these operations. But Trump has declared that they will resume on a larger scale. The homeland, he thinks, is an excellent place for U.S. armed forces to conduct battles. “We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military,” Trump said in September 2025. “We’re under invasion from within. No different than a foreign enemy but more difficult in many ways because they don’t wear uniforms.” Urban opposition has been placed within a vocabulary of war.
WHERE DOES IT END?
War has not only changed the tenor of American life and enabled a vast expansion of executive power. It has also had a radicalizing effect on parts of the population, including war veterans—a phenomenon that bears echoes of the Freikorps, the groups of disbanded soldiers in Weimar Germany who, once given policing powers against the “Bolshevik” threat, quickly became a lethal paramilitary force. In her history of the white power movement, the scholar Kathleen Belew has shown how a segment of Vietnam veterans joined civilians in building a narrative of betrayal, transferring military skills and organizational forms into paramilitary politics to be redirected against enemies at home. The 1992 Ruby Ridge confrontation and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing came from that milieu.
Today, a recurrence of that pattern can be seen among veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq. Groups such as the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters recruit current and former military personnel and police officers. Its members used military formations during the January 6 attack, and the founder of the Oath Keepers was convicted of seditious conspiracy. Of these, all had their cases dismissed, were pardoned, or had their sentences commuted by Trump. How dangerous these groups still might be is poorly understood: the Trump administration has banned contact between scholars and military personnel except in the framework of professional military education, so there is no up-to-date survey data or qualitative information on attitudes within the military about political matters. Publicly available government reporting on militias has also dried up. Given that such groups have had practical and rhetorical support from the administration in power, the threat of more violence cannot be discounted.
Of course, the war on terror also had an immense role in shaping the international environment that the United States contends with today. Iran is a more capable opponent because the war in Iraq converted Hussein’s Sunni regime into one subject to Iranian influence and helped facilitate an Iranian-backed network (the “Axis of Resistance”) across the region. Islamophobia helped spur the rise of populist right-wing parties in Europe, alongside the migration crisis caused by Syria’s civil war and ISIS’s territorial gains in Syria and Iraq. In Egypt and other Arab countries, authoritarian regimes have consolidated control and gained U.S. support by arguing that they are holding the line against terrorists. And as many as 500,000 foreign civilians were killed or died as a result of the war on terror—a history that has left its own grim legacy abroad.
The war on terror created a far more powerful government.
In the 25 years since the 9/11 attacks, the commemorations have tended to follow a predictable pattern: recollections of the awful events of that day, the reading of names, the lighting of candles. Beyond the now ritual agreement that Iraq was a huge mistake and that Afghanistan was the neglected theater, the consequences of the United States’ reaction to those attacks—and how it has remade the country—remain surprisingly unexamined.
It is well past time to give those consequences much closer attention. The 9/11 attacks accelerated the transformation of U.S. political discord from a disagreement between competing ideological coalitions into a conflict between mutually threatening social identities. Islamophobia was both an early expression of that transformation and an important mechanism through which Americans learned to define internal enemies. Over the following quarter century, this mechanism migrated from Muslims to immigrants, racial protesters, cultural minorities, and, ultimately, partisan opponents themselves. Indeed, the most important domestic political legacy of the war on terror may be that the category “terrorist” gradually shifted from the realm of political violence to a model for thinking about political opponents.
Meanwhile, the war on terror created a far more powerful government. After 9/11, the United States built a state optimized for identifying threats before they materialized, relying on ubiquitous surveillance, integrated databases, watch lists, preventive policing, militarized border enforcement, expansive secrecy, remote coercive power, broad emergency authority, and a sorcerer’s apprentice national security bureaucracy. President George W. Bush constructed much of this architecture. But even as he constrained parts of it, President Barack Obama embraced much of what he inherited. Congress repeatedly ratified or declined to dismantle it. Presidential self-restraint became the independent variable in the calculation of democracy’s fate.
This posed an obvious latent danger. Institutions created on the assumption that presidents would distinguish genuine national security threats from political enemies were safe only as long as presidents continued to make that distinction. When Trump entered the presidency in January 2017 with an unprecedented vision of executive power that he justified through inflammatory threat rhetoric, he could draw on a highly developed set of tools. The war on terror did not create American authoritarianism, but it certainly reduced the startup costs of an authoritarian presidency.
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